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Featured Article
Oct
31
The Franciscan Friars are hosting World Youth Day events in Sydney and Brisbane. Before the official celebrations in Sydney begin, the three-day International Franciscan Youth Gathering will take place in Brisbane, one week before the official program in Sydney. This is also place to go for those who want to be Franciscan WYD08 volunteers.
- www.franciscans.org.au/wyd
Oct
31
Dialogue with SSPX? Lefebrivists demand Council be “corrected,” not interpreted
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Rome, Oct 30, 2007 / 01:05 pm (CNA).- In an interview with Italian journalist Paolo Luigi Rodari, the author of the blog “Palazzo Apostolico,” Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, said the schismatic movement demands not only a “correct interpretation” of Vatican II, but that the Council documents actually be changed.Fellay defended his fellow excommunicated bishop, Ricard Williamson, identified by some in the media as leader of the “intransigent wing” of the fraternity. Fellay said, “Williamson and I are in agreement that it would be difficult to re-enter to the Church as it currently is.”
“The reasons are simple,” Fellay said, because “Benedict XVI has liberalized the ancient rite,” yet he has been criticized “by the majority of the bishops.” “What should we do? Re-enter the Church just to be insulted by these people?” he said. Read more
Oct
31
Britney’s newest publicity stunt involves inappropriate photos with “priest”
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Los Angeles, Oct 30, 2007 / 01:08 pm (CNA).- Britney Spears is attempting to stir-up controversy with her new album “Blackout” by posing suggestively in a confessional with a priest. The Catholic League’s president of Media Relations, Kiera McCaffrey, has dismissed Britney’s antics as “cheap tricks” that won’t really influence people’s image of the Church.Spears’ album photos show her leaning suggestively against a confessional wall while a “priest” listens to her sins. Another shows her sitting on the same “priest’s” lap clad in fishnet leggings.
When asked by CNA if she thought Britney’s marketing ploy would affect people’s perceptions of the Catholic Church, McCaffrey said “ No I certainly don’t think that people are going to think this happens in confessionals…and most people looking at this will think that she’s trying to just get attention.”
McCaffery characterized the pop star’s photos as a product of her personal life and bad advice from her record label: “it looks sad, it looks that this is a troubled girl, whose handlers are giving her this bright idea… and that is really no way to take care of somebody.”
Echoing earlier comments by Bill Donahue, she noted, “If everything were going well, not only in her personal life but in her career, this sort of thing wouldn’t be necessary. Britney Spears has certainly had hits before… and back before she had this crash…she didn’t need to resort to this kind of nonsense.”
Spears has garnered a lot of media attention during the last year. Most recently, she was stripped of all but monitored visitation with her two young sons after the presiding judge called her a “habitual” user of drugs and alcohol.
Oct
31
Summorum Pontificum
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It marks a new era of liturgical seriousness.
The forces in the Church most responsible for dividing Catholics from magisterial teaching are the quickest to use the word “divisive” in any controversy. A “divisive moment” is the Catholic left’s euphemism for any papal action that seeks to unite Catholics to the actual teachings and traditions of the faith.
So it goes with Pope Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which authorizes wider use of the traditional Latin Mass. “Any liberalization of the use of the Tridentine rite may prove seriously divisive,” British prelate Kieran Conry, Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, said to the Telegraph shortly before the Motu Proprio’s release. “It might send out an unfortunate signal that Rome is no longer fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council…”
No, what it signals is a welcome new era of liturgical seriousness and the beginning of the end to the demoralizing liturgical chaos and distortions of the last four decades. In Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict has not only revived a venerable liturgical tradition but supplied a catalyst to reform the new liturgy.
By making the traditional Latin Mass and the new Mass two uses (extraordinary and ordinary) of “one and the same rite,” Pope Benedict is fostering a climate of healthy coexistence, perhaps one could even say healthy competition, in which false innovations may fall away and a sense of the sacred can be recovered. Read more
Oct
31
“Jews Demand Signs” | An Interview with Roy Schoeman, editor of Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ
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Carl Olson Roy H. Schoeman was born in a suburb of New York City of “Conservative” Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry, including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, probably the foremost Conservative Rabbi in the U.S. and his hometown Rabbi growing up; Rabbi Arthur Green, later the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who was his religion teacher and mentor during high school and early college; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi with whom he lived in Israel for several months.
His secular education included a B.Sc. from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard Business School. Midway through a career of teaching and consulting (he had been appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Business School) he experienced an unexpected and instantaneous conversion to Christianity which led to a dramatic refocus of his activities. Since then he has pursued theological studies at several seminaries, written the acclaimed book Salvation Is From the Jews, helped produce and host a Catholic Television talk show, and edited and written for several Catholic books and reviews. His website is www.SalvationIsFromTheJews.com.
Schoeman was recently interviewed by Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about the book, Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ, which Schoeman compiled and edited.
Ignatius Insight: The sixteen stories of conversion in Honey from the Rock come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and historical eras. How and why did you go about compiling them?
Roy Schoeman: After I wrote Salvation is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, I found myself being invited to speak about the book, and to give my witness testimony, in more and more places. When I recounted the, frankly, miraculous events – a direct encounter with Christ, and later an extremely vivid and awake-feeling dream of the Blessed Virgin Mary (my witness testimony appears, in various forms, in both of my books as well as on my website) – people were surprised that such extraordinary graces had been granted me in order to bring me, an anti-Catholic Jew, to the truth of post-Messianic Judaism: that is, the Catholic Church.
Yet I knew from both my reading and my encounters with other Jewish Catholics that such experiences were more the norm than the exception for Jews who come to faith in Christ; after all, St. Paul himself said, “Jews demand signs” (1 Cor 1:22). I thought it would be useful to collect a group of such stories – first person witness testimonies whenever possible – that showed the lengths that Jesus was prepared to go to to bring home those who were first His people – the Jews. This is particularly important today, since we are living in a time when the pernicious falsehood is being spread, even by some Catholic theologians, that there is no need to evangelize the Jews because they are already in their own saving covenant with God. Nothing could be further from the truth – after all, it was to Jews that Jesus said “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”(Jn 3:5) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53); it was Jews, and only to Jews, that Jesus evangelized during His time on earth (”Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” — Mt. 10:5-6); and it was for evangelizing Jews that He was crucified. Read more
Oct
31
What direction does a person choose for his existence if he has decided to tune the instrument of his life to the keynote of “faith”? This question is not an easy one to answer because it obviously reaches down to the deeper levels of human nature, to attributes that are not always visible on the surface but that penetrate and leave their imprint on the whole, yet without being anywhere measureable. All the important fundamental decisions of human existence that go beyond our ordinary concern about the details of everyday living can be understood if we ourselves make some small effort to enter into the movement from which they flow - whether it is a question of a great love, of the passion of the inventor, or of a renunciation required of those who devote their lives to a revolutionary idea; whether it is a question of the attitude expressed in the smile of a Buddha or the faith of a Christian…We can explain what faith really means for an individual only by pointing to the lives of those who have lived it in its fullness: Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, IGnatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, John XXIII; in such persons, and basically only in them, can we come to know what kind of decision faith is. As we can see in the lives of such individuals, faith is a kind of passion, or, more correctly, a love that seizes an individual and shows him the direction he must go, however fatiguing it may be - the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of a mountain to climb, which to the ordinary Christian would seem foolish indeed but to one who has committed himself to the venture is clearly the only direction to take - a direction he would not exchange for any conceivably more comfortable one.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp.39-40
Oct
31
Guard your eyes that they may not look upon anything contrary to purity; your ears, that they may not listen to evil conversation; your mind, by banishing from it all suggestive thoughts; your heart, by stifling impure desires at their very birth.
– St. John Baptist de la Salle
Oct
31
The Human Experience, NYC
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| November 3, 2007 | ||
| 8:30 pm |
From Grassroots Films of Brooklyn, New York comes THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE – the story of a band of brothers who travel the world in search of the answers to the burning questions: Who am I? Who is Man? Why do we search for meaning? Their journey brings them into the middle of the lives of the homeless on the streets of New York City, the orphans and disabled children of Peru, and the abandoned lepers in the forests of Ghana, Africa. What the young men discover changes them forever. Through one on one interviews and real life encounters, the brothers are awakened to the beauty of the human person and the resilience of the human spirit. (Source)
November 3, 2007 | 8:30PM
Our Lady of Good Counsel, 230 East 90th St. New York, NY 10128
Hosted by Catholic Underground Manhattan
Other Screening locations and times here.
If you want to know the quality of films they make, watch this clip about the Priesthood, “Fishers of Men“. Really is worth watching especially if you are thinking about discernment. -Reynor
Oct
31
Luke 13:22-30
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22 He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem.
23 And some one said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them,
24 “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.
25 When once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, `Lord, open to us.’ He will answer you, `I do not know where you come from.’
26 Then you will begin to say, `We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’
27 But he will say, `I tell you, I do not know where you come from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity!’
28 There you will weep and gnash your teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out.
29 And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God.
30 And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
Oct
30
Says Internet Youth Forums Need Real Christian Message
ROME, OCT. 28, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s vicar for the Diocese of Rome expressed his hopes that religious men and women increase their use of information technology, and thus take advantage of what he called a new form of apostolate.
Cardianl Camillo Ruini spoke to the religious at the Pontifical Urbanian University during the diocesan gathering of the Union of Major Superiors of Italy, which represents 1,287 communities and 22,000 religious in Rome.
According to the Roman diocesan weekly RomaSette, Cardinal Ruini said: “A priest from Novara told me that the theme of ‘Jesus’ is very much discussed by youth in blogs. The focus, though, comes from destructive books that are widespread today, and not from Benedict XVI’s book ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’
“What will the idea of Christ be in 10 years if these ideas triumph?”
The true Jesus
The 76-year-old prelate admitted, “I don’t understand the Internet, but especially young religious ought to enter blogs and correct the opinions of the youth, showing them the true Jesus.”
“The teaching emergency is central in Benedict XVI’s concerns,” the cardinal said. “For him, education in the faith coincides with service to society, because to form someone in the faith means to form the human person.
“Simply giving motivations for living defeats nihilism and gives value to the human person, a value that is based on Christ himself, the fact that God became a man.”
The cardinal asserted that an educator’s testimony and content can matter more than pedagogical techniques.
He called for catechists to be creative in finding occasions for promoting Benedict XVI’s book, saying it shows the solidity of faith in the historical Jesus of the Gospels, and bases the identity of the Christian in a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.
Cardinal Ruini said that in Catholic schools, “the religious can witness to Christ in all their lessons, in the sciences, in history and even in Italian literature, in an inseparable union of faith and culture. Your creativity ought to find new techniques for the vocational challenge, which ought to develop in step with society.”
Source:http://www.zenit.org/article-20858?l=english
